Weird is better than boring

"Failure is unimportant.

It takes courage 

to make a fool of yourself."

-- Charles Chaplin

Self portrait 3-20-13

"Everybody's doing it 

so why the hell should I?"

-- Gin Wigmore, "Black Sheep"

In preschool, my favorite day was painting day. It was the day the teachers set up the big wooden easels and we put on our art smocks (our father's discarded dress shirts, hanging past our knees, buttoned up the back with the collars across our necks, sleeves rolled up). We painted with fat brushes on giant sheets of paper held up by clothespins, with primary colors mixed from fat tubs of powdered pigment.

The teachers only gave us a single color to paint with, and everybody got the same color. If it was blue paint day and you wanted to paint a dog, it had to be a blue dog. If it was red paint day and you wanted to paint a landscape, it had to be a red sky.
Red earth.
Red sun.
Red trees.
Red house.
How weird.
How wonderful.
How liberating for a child to paint something the "wrong" color and have it be perfectly alright.

Probably the one-color rule had more to do with not wasting precious paint and the ease of clean up at the end of the day than it did with unlocking our creativity. But 4-year-old me didn't care about practicality. All 4-year-old me cared about was slathering on bold strokes of beautiful paint.

It's all 45-year-old me cares about, too.

I have always told my children that weird is better than boring. I believe that deep down in my heart. It's like my personal pilot light, a little blue flame that burns fierce and hot and keeps me alive. When I die, I want it as my epitaph. Beside my name and the dates of my birth and death, I want the words: "Weird is better than boring."

I hate conformity. 

I hate "groupthink." 

I hate anything/anyone that discourages creativity, individuality, uniqueness or independent thought. Yeah, I know, hate is a strong word. But in this case it's an accurate word. 

I have been part of enough groups in my life to know that I no longer want to be bound by any mentality that operates under an "illusion of invulnerability," that becomes so inflated with it's own "rightness" that it rejects any alternative point of view as wrong -- not because the alternative point of view is necessarily incorrect, but simply because the alternative point of view is different.

Choosing to live outside the group can be risky. It can feel very lonely and vulnerable out here on the fringe, without a group huddled around you for protection. 

But it can also feel like freedom. 

Stuck in the middle of a group huddle, you see only group. You see only bland, boring, muddy brown, group-colored sameness. But on the fringe, the palette is marvelous, a dizzying array of differences. 

The brushes are fat. 

The colors are bold. 

The paper is HUGE. 

And whatever color you're painting with -- even if it's weird -- is perfectly alright.

The 15th of February

Self portrait 2-15-13

"I just want to see her smile again. 

I just want her to know that I don't care about the scars." 

-- The Joker, The Dark Knight

Self portrait 2-15-13

ALL GONE!

All Gone bowl 2-11-13

 This is the All Gone bowl, and it's all mine.

It wasn't always. Growing up, I had to share it with my sisters. It was the only dish of its kind in Grandma's cupboard, so we had to take turns using it whenever more than one of us stayed overnight at her little brick house on Shoemaker Drive. We all coveted the All Gone bowl for ice cream, for cereal, for potato chips, for Cheetos.

I am a middle child, second of four, and rarely Grandma's "chosen one." It was easy to feel chronically overlooked with cuter little sisters and a more beguiling older one always pulling focus. But getting the All Gone bowl made me feel a little bit special somehow, a little less invisible, even if I only got it because it was technically my turn.

When the bowl was full, I knew for certain that the smiling clown was down there, waiting underneath the whatever-it-was I had to eat all of in order to reveal his funny face. When I tipped the bowl to drain the last dregs of milk and sugar, by golly there he'd be. Every time. Looking back at me from close up. Face to face. Eye to eye. 

"I see you."
"I see you, too."

When Grandma sold her house and moved to an assisted living apartment, my sisters and I each got a box of  her stuff to either keep or relinquish to the garage sale. I kept the clay honey pot with the beehive-shaped dipper and sculpted bear on its lid. I kept the smiling wooden orange egg timer hourglass. And I kept the All Gone bowl.

I'm fairly certain the contents of the boxes were purely arbitrary.
My mother just divvied stuff up at random.
Getting the All Gone bowl was nothing but dumb luck.
And I'll take dumb luck over no luck every day of the week.